A cloud service or a cloud computing is a service allowing to use IT resources such as computing, storage, and network, via Internet necessary and to pay per use, and represents a computing technology for providing IT related services such as data storage, processing, network and content use all together from a server in the Internet represented in a cloud-like shape.
The home cloud environment provides cloud infrastructures (computing and storage) which interwork with the home using the network technology, and users pay a certain usage fee according to the provided resource amount and a service level to thus manage content. Such a home cloud does not merely store and manage digital content such as document, music, photo, and video used by devices such as computer, tablet PC, notebook, smartphone, and television (TV) in the home only to a home device and a local server of the limited size, but stores the content to a cloud storage server connected to a home cloud gateway server. Hence, unlimited virtual resources can be dynamically provided, and the user can store, view, and update the content by accessing his/her cloud storage from web-capable places in and outside the home. In addition, when an unpredicted home device trouble or damage arises, safe content management can be achieved by backing important content or data up to the cloud storage of high reliability.
Related art including Korean Patent Publication Application No. 2010-0137323 (Dec. 30, 2010) relating to the conventional home content management describes a structure for managing multimedia content in association with the home network and the web and connecting to the device such as digital TV, or suggests an abstract structure for determining whether the local server or the cloud server processes and stores the content when the user wants to store or view the content in association with the cloud infrastructure.
However, in recent, when using the cloud resources, the user usually utilizes different cloud resources rather than using, the single cloud resource of a particular company. The related arts which suggest the interworking method of the existing home and the cloud resource do not consider different service levels provided by the cloud resources.
Thus, what is needed is a method for not only storing and viewing the content when the content is managed in the home interworking with the heterogeneous cloud infrastructures but also automatically selecting the cloud server from various cloud infrastructures for the content storage by considering the user's required service level and preference. For the content viewing, a content provision method for selecting the cloud server of optimal Quality of Service (QoS) needs to be considered.